Beach Day

This morning my sister Elizabeth and I packed up the kids and went to the beach. We pull into the parking lot and unpack our load of provisions. We pile the mass of stuff onto a large wagon, perch a child or two precariously on top and drag the whole mess to beach. One of the children start to whine about the heat. My sister and I are getting snappish from the morning packing and getting the children ready. I tell the whining child to please zip it until we get to the water in two minutes.

To make matters worse, the hat I stuffed on my head is making my head itchy and sweat has started to pour down my face. I can't scratch the itch or wipe off the dripping sweat because both arms are full of blankets and towels. We are a bedraggled noisy bunch. As I walk behind my heavily pregnant sister and watch her pull the wagon piled high with all of our beach day 'stuff'. It occurs to me that we look like victims of some natural disaster carrying all of our worldly possessions. All that's missing is the red cross on my van.

We look for our friend Crystal and she is easy to find. She has a large shade tent set up with a beach umbrella and a King size quilt. We put up our umbrellas and lay out our blankets. We Pull the sunscreen,hats,bathing suits, water shoes, beach toys, floating devices and other odd and sundry items out of our large beach bags. The coolers are set onto the beach and we start discussing who has brought what food and how much. As fellow disaster survivors having enough food to last until labour day is not an anomaly.

Now that we have set up base camp we start to apply sunscreen on the children and hand out food. The kids eventually start playing in the water and us mamas get to gossip, with one eye on the kids, and we get to work on our mama tans. It's what I call our tans. It's a fun perk of being a stay at home mom. The mama tan. While most are slaving at the office we get the 'slave' at the beach. At my recent 20 year high school reunion my dear friend Dianea got an awesome dark spray tan. Looked great. Me, I saved a few pennies at the tanning salon and showed off my mama tan. I like it, the tan, it hides the dark circles under my eyes. If it's not my small child waking me up at night it's my teenage son coming home in the wee hours of the morning ringing the doorbell because he forgot his key.

I digressed . . . my point? And I do have one. If I'm going to walk around like some sad disaster survivor I might as well look good with a politically incorrect non fake melanomious (is that a word?) tan.